Sunrise Earl

As hurricane Earl wound it's way up the east coast in September of 2022, we were preparing for the first hurricane rains of the season here in New Hampshire.  Monday's weather forecast predicted heavy cloud cover and spotty rain showers for Tuesday.  Looking at my weather references it looked like the clouds might beat out the sunrise, but then again, it might not.

Never the less, I was on site and set up about an hour before sunrise.  With the exception of a barred owl calling out from the forest below, there wasn't a sound except for the occasional passing car.  As it got lighter I could see the fog rising up from the lakes down in the valley.  As the colors started to glow in the southeastern sky I began hitting the shutter, fearing that each set of shots my be my last before the storm clouds overtook the sunrise.  Each set was better than the previous for about twenty minutes before it the rain rolled in and it all started to fade away.

This panorama is one of several shots I took that Tuesday morning.  The color in the sky can be attributed to the layer of hazy smoke blowing in from the western wildfires and the first of the fringe clouds from the Atlantic hurricane Earl rotating in from the north at a fairly decent clip.

This image reflects the moment the sun broken the horizon in the eastern sky.  And what you see here for sun is all I saw all morning.  The cloud cover in the east was dense enough to block out sight of the fireball, but it scattered it's light everywhere against the advancing storm.

Once the rains started falling on my I decided it was time to pack up the camera and head home. 

This is a series of six exposures shot in landscape format, stitched together in Adobe Lightroom with final tonal adjustments in Photoshop.  As show here, this is a 55" x 17" image at 300ppi.  Shot with a Nikon D850, 24-70mm lens at 45mm, 1/60 sec each, f/6.3, ISO400 in Manual mode.